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Comment by strken | Hacker News Reader

Articles like this really make me aware that men and women like Ellen Pao and her former partners live in a separate parallel world: three degrees, $10 million golden parachutes, private jet flights to ski resorts, affairs with a creepy married co-worker in Germany, machismo-driven muscling for VC connections, bisexual finance wizards who kickstart an Ivy-League LGBT program, dominance games over which chair an exec sits in, PR firms hired to smear uppity former partners... it's like a movie.

I worry that the media looks at cases like this as typical of the experience of women in tech, and downplays the impact of obvious and unobjectionable steps like "recruit junior devs from the ranks of biology grads" and "give expectant mothers maternity leave" because systemic changes aren't as interesting as diversity training or a VC partner's lawsuit.

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Yeah, that really struck me as well.

I've been in tech for close to 20 years now. I get paid pretty well compared to the national average pay, and globally speaking it's off the charts.

But the figures and activities mentioned there are completely alien to me. This is the (a?) world of high finance and I can't relate to it.

I've seen a lot of casual and systemic sexism in the tech industry, in the trenches and at the coal face so to speak. I think it's often this that is the focus of criticism of the industry as a whole, and I think it's this that's a valid criticism of the tech industry.

To be absolutely clear - From what I've read here, Ellen Pao was treated really, really badly and has a whole litany of valid complaints, I just don't recognise the business painted here to be "tech".

> I just don't recognise the business painted here to be "tech"

I get this feeling off a lot of high-profile stories, whether tech, banking, real estate, or something else altogether. Theranos gave me some of the same sense, that the business wasn't 'medicine' but 'power'. Back before his campaign, Trump's Scottish golf course did also. He bought cheap land that wasn't zoned for a golf course, because at that level zoning laws are business hurdles to have altered, not boundaries to work within. The hiring collusion story in tech as well; it happened in the Valley, but was a consequence of power, not tech.

At a certain point you're not talking about the culture of some specific industry, you're talking about the culture of the rich, powerful, and cutthroat across any industry. I think it's an important distinction to maintain.

You can't relate to them and they've probably lost the ability to relate to you. I grew up in a small Eastern European country where everyone knows someone who managed to profit hugely during the times of upheaval in the 90's and one of my school buddies from back then likes to go watch F1 races in Monaco from the deck of his speed-boat. When he's not spending his summers kite-surfing on the shores of Turkey.

I mean, I'm also in tech, in the US, which means my salary is higher than 99% of salaries in the world, but I can't begin to dream of living the same lifestyle my buddy can enjoy, and he's most likely small potatoes compared to the "wolf-of-wallstreet" types mentioned here.

It's unbelievable.

I think the reason it matters isn't because it's the same industry. It's because VC firms often play a huge part in how the workplace culture develops in the firms that they invest in. They have board seats, and CEOs often look to them for guidance.

"I just don't recognise the business painted here to be "tech"."

Perhaps. But those VCs and CEOs and COOs are your bosses. Just as engineering cannot be divorced from the effects of what is built,"tech" is hard to separate from it's own environment. And it appears that the same antics continue down the stack.

> But those VCs and CEOs and COOs are your bosses.

No, they aren't. I don't mean to be hostile here, but I object strongly to the implicit assumption that 'tech' means "heavily Sandhill-funded software companies operating in the Valley".

I've worked at several software companies, some good, some bad. But I, like a very large portion of American 'tech' workers or even 'CS-degree bearing programmers', have never actually worked for a Silicon Valley company, much less one with major VC financing, much less one where VC culture has shaped everyone else's environment.

That's not to deny that there can be a very real issue here. But as an example, banking has similar serious issues at the top, and I wouldn't assume that every realtor's office, even ones ultimately tied to Merrill Lynch, had the same issues. Even if a realtor did have issues with sexism and discrimination, I think it would be unreasonable to assume that they came from what happened at the top carrying 'down the stack'.

I think it does a real disservice to 'tech' in general to understand it entirely in light of people like Travis Kalanick and Justin Caldbeck. I think it even does a disservice to efforts to fight sexism and harassment; the behavior of the richest and most powerful people in tech seems to have more in common with the rich and powerful of other industries than the rank-and-file of tech.

And I worry that this concept of trickle-down misbehavior will do exactly what the top comment points out - obscure everyday issues and opportunities in favor of a focus on a small group that's behaving quite differently, and can't be easily improved.

Where I am now, not so sure. I contract with an SME that's now owned by a big German car maker. Previously I've worked with Big Blue and a lot of smaller firms not reliant on VCs so far as I can tell.

The nearest would likely have been when I worked with London "unicorn" Powa Technologies, and we all know how that went...

> I just don't recognise the business painted here to be "tech"

VC Cash influences power dynamics between tech companies very very heavily. If you're not in SV and chose to get funding elsewhere and are successful, safe bet that an SV competitor of yours will get better funding than you and eat up some of your potential market size. Each big firm will fund one top competitor in the space and let them duke it out, so how long will you last without their funding? Odds are high there are many companies with diverse founders and superior products who lost the battle to a competitor funded by one of these VCs. If top VC firms don't have strong female and diverse partners, they don't see the value in businesses that serve female and diverse markets as well.

Pardon my pedestrian take, but I think we're on similar pages. This is the weird, bizarro-world we inhabit because these "markets" are run by supply-side money flows. These companies don't have time to deal with the pesky issue of actual demand. Having more cash to burn is not a "sustainable competitive advantage", but we're probably long past that being meaningful to anyone.

Agree - I think many of the recent examples of Silicon Valley issues in the media seem more related to Silicon Valley VCs who inherit more traits from NYC finance, sales and hedge fund/investment banking than the hacker in the garage inventing next generation networking, programming language, search engine, machine learning or open source project.

In fact many men (and women) who chose engineering/computer science were explicitly trying to escape these questionable finance/business 'cool kid' types by specifically going into the technology field. [1]

Additionally, I think as technology becomes more ubiquitous in mainstream industries like fashion, real estate, retail, lifestyle manufacturing, tech will be taking on those industries historical problems with lack of diversity.

Many of Binary Capital's investments overall read more like applying smartphone/Uber type apps to a specific industry vertical. They seem a little light on tech, heavy on social/consumer aspects.

https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/binary-capital#/enti...

And a big concern is that the proposed fixes will be focused on increasing diversity training for engineering and computer science (while for sure a good thing speaking as a father with a daughter!) should really be focused on increasing diversity training for finance, investment banking, sales, marketing in all sectors.

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html

> I think many of the recent examples of Silicon Valley issues in the media seem more related to Silicon Valley VCs who inherit more traits from NYC finance, sales and hedge fund/investment banking than the hacker in the garage inventing next generation networking, programming language, search engine, machine learning or open source project.

The cultural zeitgeist simply shifted which is why the media is full of stories of "baddies" in the tech. Culturally, tech boys are the new finance boys who of course were preceded by rock-star boys. Hell, we even call tech boys with the devil may care attitude "rock stars". Do you know what were finance boys called in the late nineties? That's right: "rock stars". Want to know who culturally is on a top of the mountain? Look at whom the likes of Miranda Kerr and Amber Heard are dating.

Did anything change in finance? Nope. Still the same types of people go into finance. Interns/juniors are still being hazed err... harassed, "rock stars" still spend thousands of dollars in strip clubs entertaining clients, etc and everything is still for sale.

I got a bit confused when she ticked off her resume--how does anyone get that much experience at all top flight companies in just a compressed amount of time? Despite the obvious issues she has faced, my career is a completely dead, non-starter compared to hers so how can she complain?

Also, I think places like Kleiner don't need to exist and the world would likely be a better place without them. But that's just my take on it all. There's better ways to live than being inside one of those pressure cookers. Enjoy the Eastern European hookers, though.

It is all relative right? She did do those things and she probably had to work harder than her male peers to get to Kleiner in the first place. I think dismissing her "complaints" is just not fair. Discrimination can happen anywhere at any professional level, the teeny top .00001% and the bottom percentage of wage earners making minimum wage. Just because it she is arguably very successful does not mean her claims have no basis.

Sorry if I am taking the tone of what you wrote wrong, I know this is a sensitive topic. I will admit I did have a sort of similar thought, "But you are still very successful and wealthy compared to practically anyone else, you are winning Ellen!" But then I realized money doesn't matter. What matters is purpose and validation of your effort in a professional environment. When your bosses and peers are constantly shitting on you, even if they are giving you a lot of money it hurts in ways that are almost impossible to know without putting your life and a little piece of your soul into something only to have it rejected by people you desperately want the respect and peerage of.

>> she probably had to work harder than her male peers >> to get to Kleiner in the first place

Probably not. The article mentions (to Ellen's credit, BTW) that Doerr was specifically looking for Asian women to hire. That's ironically probably also one of the reasons why she wasn't treated seriously: diversity hiring casts a permanent shadow over even the candidates with abundant qualifications.

"How can she complain?" Did you hear what she had to put up with? Are any of us such saints that we wouldn't be upset? I'm definitely not.

Also, consider what she might have accomplished without those hurdles.

I read stories like this and I wonder how representative they are. I'm from the different world of enterprise software and I couldn't imagine any of these things happening.

The only conversation that I've ever heard in mixed company that was even remotely similar to the ones she mentions is one time a female co-worker mentioned at lunch that her roommate was an erotic dancer at a men's club so there was a brief conversation about where she worked/how much she made/weirdest story/etc.

I'm curious if the difference between my experience and the stories I'm constantly reading is a result of selection bias or if startup technology really is a very different beast than enterprise tech from a sexism point of view.(I suspect a little of both)

What struck me was that the same Jenna Jemison obsessed CEO was one of the most ardent spokespersons for "Lean In".

As someone once said, "some of the most vocal feminist men are some of the creepiest".

It's as if it's their red herring for behaving badly.

Going from her quotes, it's as if they went out of their way to be obnoxious.

Another interesting anecdote is Kai Cole (Joss Wheadon's ex-wife): http://www.thewrap.com/joss-whedon-feminist-hypocrite-infide...

That is such a strange article. It shackles Joss Wheadon with this additional moral failing for cheating on his wife as if his feminist ideal should stop him from falling for the trappings that all rich powerful people go through.

Somehow because he has particular views of the equality of men and women, it should give him an above average amount of will power to stop himself from temptation?

Feminism is a political stance not a moral super-power. The great majority of people with access to something will not hold themselves back. Men in positions of power will have women throwing themselves at them. Most men will succumb to that temptation the same way the majority of the population with access to food will eventually succumb to the temptation to overeat.

At some point almost all people will get fat as they get comfortable and older. From all accounts I've heard, nearly all professional atheletes and musicans cheat. If you had beautiful women throwing themselves at you, you would probably succumb to it eventually. Most men do. Women's sex drive and biochemistry is different and most attractive women have had men throwing themselves (or at least have 2nd hand experience through a friend) and thus it isn't equivalent. Most women don't know what it's like to have what you were chasing your whole life, chasing you. It's like being a lion and have gazelles trying to leap into your mouth all the time.

When you add the fact that his casting someone (and he was known for casting relatively unknown actors) could change the course of their entire career and thus life, and most of those who could benefit the most are literally a self-selected group of the most beautiful women in the world, it's no wonder why he cheated.

So, to take all of that and heap some kinda extra moral failure on him is unfair. If she cheated, it wouldn't be some failure of her feminist stance. She would just be someone who cheated.

It was merely a betrayal of a loved one but, doesn't mean that all of a sudden he hates women because he cheated.

> Somehow because he has particular views of the equality of men and women, it should give him an above average amount of will power to stop himself from temptation?

I don't know.

From my own reading of her article, it seemed like her (feminism-related) issue stemmed from him using feminism as both a shield and excuse to pick up women.

But, to _try_ to answer your—perhaps rhetorical—question, I'd say yes to the extent that somebody who talks the talk should walk the walk. Having extramarital affairs isn't respecting your wife. IMO, it's similar to an unabashed anti/non-racist repeatedly using racial slurs. Like, there's a bit of dissonance there that needs to be spoken to.

obvious and unobjectionable steps like "recruit junior devs from the ranks of biology grads

I don't follow how this is an obvious decision. Would you please elaborate? If the target software isn't dealing with the biology domain, why would I prefer biology grads over computer science grads? It seems like the lack of formal knowledge around CS fundamentals could prove a hindrance, while the biology knowledge wouldn't be an asset.

This principle may be workable for some portion of the work space, especially for your typical webapp or webservice. We flout the 'anybody can learn to code' concept, and that's true to some extent. But if the domain space is low-level hardware, highly algorithmic or heavy in the domain modeling space it seems completely reasonable to prefer someone with a formal background in CS.

Not biology, but I've had great success hiring mechanical engineers to write code. I'm not sure what it is--perhaps some mindset they learn in school--but I've yet to meet one that didn't develop into an excellent software engineer as well.

So perhaps biology has a similar synergy.

The vast majority of jobs now are not 'low-level hardware, highly algorithmic or heavy in the domain modeling space'. They're corporate CRUD-style apps, existing software maintenance, and other such things. There's no reason that a bright student with a biology background couldn't be a perfect fit for these sorts of things if they have some contact with a computer science class or two.

There's no reason that a bright student with a biology background couldn't be a perfect fit for these sorts of things if they have some contact with a computer science class or two.

Sure, it's completely realistic for a biology student (or any other discipline) to serve in a junior or line developer position in many corporate environments. If you're just wiring Spring beans together, writing test cases, or doing basic sysadmin work there's not much CS doing on.

My experience is that the differences show as you become more senior or you want to do things off the beaten path. Once you start dealing with comprehensive troubleshooting (back-to-front), non-trivial data modeling, and architecture the lack of fundamentals starts to slow you down. Understanding a DAG is pretty important in certain cases, and if you weren't exposed to it that's alot of outside learning. It's doable, but you have to put in more and more personal time to keep up. Whereas the CS folks are building on at least passing knowledge over four years of study.

To put my biases on the table, I'm a self-taught dev that went back for my BS degree. I have strong bias towards the value of a CS education.

Biases on the table: co-authored a paper on machine learning, graduated undergrad summa cum laude from an CS honors program with a 4.0 GPA in courses in CS, then dropped out in the first semester in an CS MSc program due to personal issues. You'll find no stronger proponent of a classical CS education.

There is plenty of time for someone to learn about DAGs (really, they're not rocket science) while they're a junior dev, and a bright person, given a series of tasks slightly increasing in complexity and difficulty, will have no trouble learning the fundamentals.

Most of my CS classmates were much more interested in going to school to get their degree to become the next Mark Zuckerberg or maybe work for him. They'd cram for tests between beer pong and bong hits and forget 90% of what they were there to learn. I'd rather hire someone who is bright with any college degree (best programmer where I worked at in my last job had a Masters in dramatic arts) than a random somebody with a CS background. Everything I need in theory from a junior dev can be tested during an interview - it doesn't take a rocket scientist to know what quicksort is, or how to write documentation, or how to create a new class in Java without using an IDE.

I guess the major difference is that I don't see a CS degree as a sign of a good programmer. I see it as a sign that someone endured classes for four years, and I am open to the possibility that someone with another degree might be a better fit at a junior level than anybody with a CS degree that bothered to respond to the job posting.

Seems like a waste of a bright biology student.

Not if that biology student wants a decent life. There's not much money in science. It pays much, much more to be a mediocre dev.

Nobody is forcing them to take the job, just widening the target audience of the job search.

> There's no reason that a bright student with a biology background couldn't be a perfect fit

There's no reason that a bright student with Chinese poetry background couldn't be a perfect fit. But I think there's reasons why we still have CS degrees even though there's no reason why any bright person can't teach oneself coding. OTOH, if you go this route and say CS degree doesn't matter at all, just drop any connection to degrees and hire people based on tests or something - why link it to biology?

I'm not saying that it doesn't matter - clearly someone with a CS degree is more _likely_ to be a better fit, but I see no reason to limit targeting of job postings for junior developer positions to just recently graduated CS undergrads when there are plenty of other people with other degree backgrounds that might be a good fit as well.

I wouldn't link it specifically to a biology degree, but my initial response was to someone who asked about it specifically.

> recruit junior devs from the ranks of biology grad

Targeting specific groups just because of the racial or gender makeup of the group seems inherently wrong to me.

A biology major doesn't give people many relevant skills for programming. If it was a math intensive subject like Physics, Stats or Math, I could see it being more fair and valid.

It's a bit cynical to say that's done simply in the name of gender. There are certainly many talented people who move away from tech because they look at it from the outside and observe that tech "isn't for them". There is nothing "inherently wrong" in correcting some of that unless you willfully ignore how our society came to be.

> There are certainly many talented people who move away from tech

Let's be honest, most biology majors turned programmers aren't oppressed people who had passion for tech but were discouraged from tech by terrible, systemic biases. They're people who either couldn't make it to med school or didn't want to go to med school who realized that there is more $$$ in the tech field than in biology research.

> It's a bit cynical to say that's done simply in the name of gender.

Not really. In this context, that is exactly what the parent was saying. Again, there are many non-CS majors that give people skills more relevant to programming. There isn't much of a reason to specifically recruit biology majors (other than for demographic reasons or if the company software is related to biology).

> Let's be honest

If you're going to make such a claim, you should provide some sort of proof. By your cynical logic, engineers are no more than nerds who don't have the stones to go into finance--where the money really is.

> There isn't much of a reason to specifically recruit biology majors (other than for demographic reasons or if the company software is related to biology).

I know many talented biology majors who have no interest spending their entire career alongside men smugly assume they "couldn't make it into med school". Or those who actually believe in the work that they're doing. Try telling the hundreds of thousands in research labs working on groundbreaking science like CRISPR that their careers are considered settling.

> Targeting specific groups just because of the racial or gender makeup of the group seems inherently wrong to me.

It did not click in my head initially but damn this is a great proxy.

> affairs with a creepy married co-worker in Germany, machismo-driven muscling for VC connections, dominance games over which chair an exec sits in, PR firms hired to smear uppity former partners... it's like a movie.

I wonder how prevalent such behavior is amongst the truly exceptional people vs the imposters who just happened to be successful due to luck and in many cases sheer force of personality (seems to still work in old school industries). Part of me would like to think that the Zucks, Bezos and Gates of the world don't partake in such shenanigans and would rather just keep their head down and work conscientiously.

Why do we still give a shit how someone chooses to spend their free time? Why can't you be successful and partake in drunken S&M orgies at 3 am? As long as it's between consenting adults, I don't see why it should somehow tarnish your character.

I despise this "soccer-mom-approved" bullshit where the only acceptable free time activity is attending a little league baseball game or organizing a church picnic.

Would Einstein's work somehow be diminished if it came out that he liked to experiment with mushrooms?

I was really hoping that we'd have stopped judging people on these criteria by now. So disappointing that we haven't.

I don't think most people care about successful people partaking in drunken S&M orgies at 3 AM - at least, I don't. What I care about are the people who use their success, status, and position in a company to make other people feel like they also need to be a part of their drunken 3 AM debauchery. Or else face consequences.

I didn't get the impression from Ellen's account that the major problem was the fact that Ajit was cheating on his wife or lying to Ellen about it (although that in itself is not morally OK); the major problem was after she rebuffed him, the backlash that she faced due to his position of power within the company and community at large.

Uhmm you make a reasonable argument but I am not sure why it's a reply to my comment. I was commenting on peoples behavior in the workplace and not how they spend their free time. Did you just inadvertently create a strawman so you could attack it?

You see I like many people here aspire to be successful but neither do I have the personality to for example play dominance games nor the desire to develop such a personality and hence I wonder if that's something that might truly handicap one or just something that imposters do.

That's not the point. But it might tell something about the mentality and the psychology of a category of people, if they are more prone to such 'hobbies' than other categories.

I have a feeling we by now have way too much "tell something about the mentality" things. People seek most minute and irrelevant details about somebody's life and blow them up into the whole narrative about how it reveals the darkest depths of somebody's psychology, all while ignoring the open history of behavior, speech, accomplishments and so on. The idea that all the observable behavior is just a facade and only this one or two particular details about something that was said or done once 20 years ago reveals somebody's "true character" is bewildering in its irrationality, and still seems to be widely popular.

It's projection. Not the "I'm ascribing my attitudes to the other" flavor of projection that most people think of. It's the kind that makes someone go "Oh, of course this other has this set of attributes that make them exactly the kind of person I already have a stereotype for and opinion of."

Secondly, there are people that spend a great deal of mental effort concealing what they consider to be their "true personality." Whether or not that is in reality who they are is tangential to the point that concealment becomes a big part of their life, and they start assuming others do it to. Or if someone was burned by a person that practices concealment, they'll be on guard for it. And that is again tangential to either's _ability_ to read a concealed aspect of another, which are often no closer than the projection described above.

I think it says something about human nature that she was equally resentful of missing the ski trip and the cookie.

The story is so far outside of my ken I have trouble believing it. And yet, like you say, this is a completely different world from mine - maybe people really do act like this.

>I think it says something about human nature that she was equally resentful of missing the ski trip and the cookie

She was not upset about missing a ski trip or a cookie. She was pointing out that women are excluded in things big and small in the VC world of KP and the pettiness of the men she worked with in passing a plate of cookies and bypassing the women. The gesture while petty spoke volumes as I would Imagine was the intent. The same could be said of the excuse of why women were excluded from the ski trip. If the company spent that much money to fly everyone out, do you really believe that KP could not afford accommodations for the women? Certainly they could. It was a passive aggressive way to say, "the women are not welcome on the ski trip" without having to say it directly. The foolish games that children play.

Sorry, what is 'hiring junior devs from the ranks of biology grads' intended to help with?

There's a meme (in the literal sense, not image macro sense) going around that because enrollment rates of women in computer science is dropping that companies should considering hiring junior developers from other programs with a higher rate of women enrolled - typically social science or biology.

I thought that biology was struggling with not having enough quantitative students with an aptitude for complex statistics and simulation, even though those directions have the highest research potential. Hardly seems like fertile ground to find software development in large numbers.

You're only partially correct.

1 ) Its true that there aren't enough quantitative oriented students, and the ones we get really suck. Aka, I searched some text and now I'm co-author!

2) A lot of these directions have really low potential because they are mainly putting spin on otherwise failed or inconclusive work. p-hacker is a pejorative. From personal while simulating a development biology model might be computationally challenging (although often not), the models I've seen seem to be flawed somewhere in their conceptual design as they lack underlying mechanics or a null hypotheses. But after you've spent a few years hanging around doing little work for little pay, you really gotta get this stuff published

tldr; computational people rare add anything of value compared to the holistic (not individual) contributions who actually do the work.

Bioinformatics scientist here.

1) There are lots of brilliant people in the field, but it is also the degree that dumb people who want a science degree or are "pre-med" get. It tremendously lowers the value of my undergrad degree. If you look at high-paying jobs (finance, investing, etc), you'll often find people who say they occasionally hire in a bright scientist who wants to switch industries. They typically hire physics and chemistry majors and are much less likely to hire someone with a biology degree.

2)The computational biologists/bioinformaticians/etc in this field are pretty variable in their CS skills and a good deal of the top performers leave the field because pay is really, really terrible. (ie my compensationv is 65K, high COL area, MS required, 1 year of direct experience under my belt, plus an additional 4 years of experience in the wider biotech industry - trust me I think my life is a joke too).

Thanks for clearing that up. I thought it was a Damore reference.

You used everything to denounce the story. Your comment itself proves that sexism exists even here not in a separate world.

Women engineers in Uber were not from that world and they had the same sexism. But, of course people will find some other way to denounce that too.

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